Southern California

The Fatally Flawed Centerpiece of California’s Transportation Future

May 2, 2018 By Ed Ring 5 Comments

California’s transportation future is bright. In every area of transportation innovation, California-based companies are leading the way. Consortiums of major global companies have offices throughout the San Francisco Bay area, pioneering self-driving cars that consolidate technologies from not just automakers, but cell phone manufacturers, chip designers, PC makers, telecoms, and software companies. In Southern California from the aerospace hub surrounding LAX to the Mojave desert, heavily funded consortiums experiment with everything from passenger drones to hyperloop technologies to hypersonic transports. It’s all happening here. It’s wondrous.

Meanwhile, instead of preparing the roads for smart cars, or designing hubs that integrate buses and cars-on-demand with aerial drones and hyperloop systems, the centerpiece of California’s transportation future is a train that isn’t very fast, being built at what is probably the highest cost-per-mile in the history of transportation, which hardly anyone will ever ride.

There is a stark contrast between California’s private entrepreneurial culture, as reflected in the marvels of transportation engineering they are developing, and California’s political culture, as reflected in their ongoing commitment to “high speed rail,” in all of its stupefying expense, its useless grandeur, its jobs for nothing, its monumental initial waste, situated miles from nowhere. Exploring that stark contrast, its origins, the players, the projects, the problems and the solutions, will be the topic of this and subsequent reports.

HIGH SPEED RAIL – THE FATALLY FLAWED CENTERPIECE

The fatally flawed centerpiece of California’s transportation future, the “Bullet Train,” unfairly dominates California’s transportation conversation. Unfair not only because it represents a prodigious waste of public resources and an epic failure of public policy, but because in spite of the Bullet Train fiasco, California’s private sector is designing and building a transportation future for the world at dazzling speed. But before surveying the excellent progress being made elsewhere in the Golden State, it is necessary, yet again, to tick through the reasons why the Bullet Train is the wrong solution, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Fifty years ago, before air travel became affordable to nearly anyone, before you could fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles for less money than it would cost in gasoline to drive there in your car, rail travel might have made sense. But today, airfare is only about twice the cost of bus fare, with total air travel time a minute fraction of what the same trip would take on a bus.

Fifty years ago, before land values and environmentalist lawsuits rendered any capital project prohibitively expensive, building a high-speed rail corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles might have made sense. But today, the latest cost estimates for the SF/LA route exceed $100 billion.

Unrealistic Projections

High speed rail makes sense for intercity applications in megapolises. For example, a high speed rail line connects three of Japan’s largest cities, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Nearly all of this 300 mile corridor is urbanized – in all, over 70 million Japanese live in this region of Japan.

By contrast, just phase one of the California high speed rail project, linking San Francisco with Los Angeles, will be 520 miles long, connecting about 24 million people. This doesn’t pass the density test. Compared to a successful high speed rail system – which the Tokyo/Osaka system certainly is – the San Francisco/Los Angeles system would be nearly twice as long, and serve only about one third as many people.

Put another way, there are 233,000 Japanese, per mile, living along the Tokyo/Osaka route, whereas there are 46,000 Californians, per mile, living along the proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles route. That means there are five times as many potential riders on Japan’s centerpiece bullet train as there might be on California’s.

Low ridership isn’t just a consequence of insufficient population density, although that is a critical precondition. Low ridership also stems from impracticality. The California High Speed Rail Authority’s 2018 “business plan” is disingenuous on this topic. They claim that travel to and from the airport chews up time, yet ignore travel time to and from a high-speed rail station. Travel time to these stations, air vs. rail, are entirely offsetting. Then they claim time that boarding high speed rail is quicker than boarding an airplane. Why? A frequent air traveler has TSA Pre, and typically sails through check-in and security. And won’t security be in place for high speed rail? Of course it will. Boarding time – also entirely offsetting. Which brings us to the actual travel time.

The current projection according to the CA HSR 2018 business plan (ref. page 7) is three hours for nonstop service from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This is definitely a best-case estimate. As reported on March 18th in the Los Angeles Times, “Of the roughly 434 miles of track between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 136 miles — nearly one-third of the total — could have at least some speed restrictions.” This would include tunnels, sharp curves, all transits through urban areas, and, incredibly, shared track and shared right-of-way with conventional rail carriers.

It is going to take twice as long to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles via high speed rail vs. an airplane. Let’s not forget there are three major airports in the San Francisco Bay Area – SJC, OAK, and SFO. Five major airports serve the Los Angeles area – LAX, ONT, BUR, LGB and SNA. And flights connect all of them to each other, all day, every day.

Perpetual Financial Drain

Even if you accept the official projections for California’s high speed rail, the financial projections are unlikely to attract private capital. The table depicted below uses baseline projections from the CA HSR 2018 business plan (numbers directly taken from the business plan are highlighted in yellow, with numbers in intermediate years, which were not disclosed in the business plan, arrived at by extrapolation) to construct a cash flow for the “Phase One” portion of the project, those segments connecting San Francisco to Bakersfield. All of the variables are taken from that document. Several generous assumptions are necessary to accept these projections. They are:

(1) The entire capital cost for construction of the Phase One system linking San Francisco to Bakersfield is $40.1 billion (ref. page 32, exhibit 3.2 “Summary of Cost Estimates by Phase and by Range”). This is crazy. It will probably cost half that just to bore a tunnel under the Pacheco Pass.

(2) Ridership on this segment will grow to 31.9 million fares per year by 2035. Assuming primarily commuter traffic, this assumes over 120,000 riders per day (ref. page 90, exhibit 7.1 “Ridership: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Ridership”).

(3) Incredibly, fare revenue will hit $1.86 billion by 2035. This assumes an average ticket price, in 2017 dollars, of $60. This, in turn, infers that the average commuter will be spending $1,220 per month to ride the bullet train (ref. page 90, exhibit 7.3 “Farebox Revenue: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Revenue”). This is perhaps the most far fetched of all assumptions made in the entire business plan. Imagine over 120,000 regular commuters spending $1,200 per month to ride this train, noting the fact that this sum would not include the additional costs virtually all commuters would incur to travel from their home to the HSR station, and then from the HSR station to their workplace, on both their outbound and inbound commute, day after day.

(4) Operations and maintenance for the train will be a mere $1.4 billion in 2035, then, after adjusting for 3% inflation, will only increase 11% by 2060 even though ridership is projected to rise from 31.9 million passengers in 2035 to 51.2 million by 2060 (ref. page 91, exhibit 7.5 “O&M Costs: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Cost Estimate”). This defies credulity. How will ridership increase by 61% between 2035 and 2060 while O&M costs only increase 11%?

(5) “Lifecycle Costs,” the capital reinvestment necessary to replace worn out rolling stock and other fixed assets, i.e. “capital rehabilitation and replacement costs for the infrastructure and assets of the future high-speed rail system,” as near as can be determined from the 2018 business plan, is estimated to only total around $5 billion between commencement of operations in 2029 and 2060, over 30 years (ref. page 91, exhibit 7.6 “Lifecycle Costs: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Lifecycle Cost”).

(6) In the analysis below, loan payments are deferred for up to ten years until rail operations begin in 2029. In reality, of course, payments begin as soon as the money is loaned. Notwithstanding that, the annual loan payments are calculated based on loan of $40.1 billion, a 30 year term, and 5% interest.

CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL
CASH FLOW USING 2018 BUSINESS PLAN’S “BASELINE” PROJECTIONS, $=M

Taking into account these are – for the six reasons just stated – very optimistic projections, there remain problems with these numbers that would give any investor pause. For starters, there is a cumulative negative cash flow of $14 billion, representing the period up until 2039 when the system is projected to become cash-positive. This represents over 20 years of negative cash flow. Where will this $14 billion come from? Bear in mind it will be more than $14 billion, since payments on the loans commence when the monies are loaned, not when the system begins operations. Maybe some of it will come from “cap and trade” proceeds, although if so, it would consume nearly all of them. Would private investors step up?

The problem with that is if you review this best-case scenario, you can see that selling the future positive cash flow to finance the initial negative cash flow would yield an internal rate of return of 4.7%. While that’s not an impossibly low rate for a municipal financing, it is exceedingly low for a private financing subject to this level of risk. And what about the risk?

High Speed Rail Cash Flow Using Conservative Assumptions

The next chart shows a cash flow scenario for high speed rail, phase one, with key assumptions changed. Instead of costing $40.1 billion, it costs $49 billion, the “High” range of cost estimates as disclosed on the HSR 2018 business plan, page 32. Instead of an average ticket price of $60, a more affordable $30 price is used, based on the assumption that the average commuter will not be willing to spend more than $600 per month on train fare. As ridership grows by 60% between 2035 and 2060, operations and maintenance costs are escalated by 30% instead of only 11%. And instead of spending a mere $5 billion on ongoing capital investments between 2029 and 2060, that is doubled to a still paltry $10 billion. What happens?

CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL
CASH FLOW USING ALTERNATIVE (CONSERVATIVE) PROJECTIONS, $=M

As can be seen on this alternative analysis, if ridership revenue is significantly lower than projected, and if – one might argue – realistic operations and capital budgets are projected, and, if one merely uses the HSR Authority’s own high estimate of capital costs, there is no financial viability whatsoever to this project. The internal rate of return formula basically blows up, which is what happens when you burn through $91 billion before having your first break-even year in 2059. The question instead becomes, what else might Californians have done with $50 billion? The other question raised by this more conservative financial scenario, more disturbing, is what if high speed rail never makes money? How many additional tens of billions will be required to subsidize its operation?

The problem with dismissing these more bleak financial scenarios is simple: this is the sort of analysis that any savvy investment banker would start with. Then they would ask questions. WHY do you think 120,000 people are going to be willing to spend $1,200 per month in train fares to commute, not even including their costs to get to and from the train station? WHY do you think you can increase ridership by 60%, but only increase operations costs by 11%? WHY do you think you can operate a $50 billion railroad, and only expect to reinvest ten percent of that amount in capital equipment over thirty years?

The “Monte Carlo” Method of What-If Analysis

Instead of confronting these questions in plain English, the high speed rail authority did what-ifs using a “Monte Carlo” analysis. Here’s how they describe this (ref. page 93):

“Breakeven forecasts measure the likelihood that farebox revenue is equal to or greater than operations and maintenance costs in a given operating year. The analysis works as though there are two large bags full of marbles, one with thousands of marbles each representing a potential operations and maintenance cost, with more of the marbles having values around the median cost estimate than around the extreme (high or low) values. The second bag of marbles contains potential revenue outcomes, again with more marbles with values around the median than the high or low outliers.

The breakeven Monte Carlo analysis simply “picks” one marble at random from the revenue bag and one marble at random from the cost bag, subtracts the number written on the cost marble from the one written on the revenue marble and records the value. The analysis then puts the marbles back into their respective bags and repeats the process thousands more times which builds a distribution of potential results and generates a degree of confidence (or confidence interval, expressed as a percentage) as to the likelihood of project breakeven.”

If anyone wonders why projects in California cost far more than they should, please consider the role of consultants. The variables governing success or failure for California’s high speed rail project are tangible. They require urgent debate by practical people. How much will it cost to bore a tunnel through the Pacheco Pass? How likely is it that Union Pacific will share their right-of-ways with high speed rail, and if so, how much will that reduce costs, and how much will that reduce the speed of the train along those segments, and why? What is the real cost of the many engineering and environmental studies, and how many of them are necessary? Why is it that so many other nations, from socialist Europe to fascist China, manage to build these systems for a fraction of what Californians must expect to pay?

These are the questions that require answers. Counting metaphorical marbles does not add value to the process, nor does it add credibility to the financial projections. These qualitative questions regarding California’s high speed rail project have not been answered, because perhaps they cannot be answered. But the reasons California’s high speed rail system is so staggeringly, prohibitively expensive, are not problems that are confined to the high speed rail project. They infect every infrastructure program in the United States, and especially in California. Identifying the reasons infrastructure projects cost far more than they should, along with exploring tantalizing alternatives to high speed rail, will be the topic of future reports.

* * *

Edward Ring co-founded the California Policy Center in 2010 and served as its president through 2016. He is a prolific writer on the topics of political reform and sustainable economic development.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: bullet train, high speed rail, Hyperloop, Southern California

Housing bill with $230 million cost estimated to save renters only $20 per month

February 21, 2018 By Chris Reed 2 Comments

State Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, and 16 co-sponsors have introduced legislation that sounds like a bold move to address the high cost of housing. Glazer’s Senate Bill 1182 would double the state tax credit for renters. But that turns out to only mean a maximum annual savings of $240.

The last time the rental tax credit was increased, in 1979, it set the credit at $10 per month for an individual filer and $20 a month for joint filers, with eligibility capped by total income. Senate Bill 1182 would increase the cap to $20 per month for individuals and $40 per month for joint filers. To be eligible, individuals have to have gross incomes of $40,078 or less and joint filers have to have incomes of $80,156 or less.

One-bedroom apartments routinely go for $1,700 or more per month in most metropolitan areas and the average home sale is above $500,000 in most of Southern California and over $1 million in the Bay Area. Glazer’s credit would mean that joint filers paying the average rent go from spending $20,160 in a year to spending $19,920 – a 1.2 percent savings. Individual filers paying the average rent would drop from $20,280 a year to $20,160 – a 0.6 percent savings. The percentage savings on a typical mortgage would be much lower.

In his news release announcing the legislation, Glazer noted attempts by the Legislature on many fronts to make it easier to build more housing, starting with streamlining regulations and giving qualified projects guaranteed approvals. He said these efforts could take years before they began helping Californians.

“None of those measures directed relief to the monthly budgets of struggling renters,” Glazer said. “The renter’s tax credit does.”

Three Republicans among co-sponsors

The news release listed these lawmakers, including three Republicans, as co-authors: Sens. Jim Beall, D-San Jose; Steve Bradford, D-Gardena: Bill Dodd, D-Napa; Cathleen Galgiani, D-Stockton; Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo; Ben Hueso, D-San Diego; Connie Leyva, D-Chino; Josh Newman, D-Fullerton; Janet Nguyen, R-Fountain Valley; Richard Pan, D-Sacramento; Anthony Portantino, D-Glendale; Richard Roth, D-Riverside; Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley; Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont; Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita; and Assemblyman Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale.

Glazer’s office said the higher renters’ tax credit would cost the state $230 million in annual revenue.

There are other restrictions on eligibility for the renters’ tax credit besides income caps, the Franchise Tax Board’s website notes. They include:

– Tax filers need to have paid rent for at least six months for shelter that served as their principal residence.

– The rented property was not on a parcel exempt from state property tax.

– The property was not shared for more than six months with a parent or a guardian or any individual who could claim the tax filer as a dependent.

– The tax filer was not a minor living with a legal guardian, parent or foster parent.

Glazer, 60, a former political and development consultant and aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, won a May 2015 special election to fill the final 19 months of Mark DeSaulnier’s state Senate seat after DeSaulnier was elected to Congress in 2014. He won a full four-year term in 2016.

This articles was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bay Area, Housing affordability, Jerry Brown, Southern California, Steve Glazer

California ‘Road Diet’ Antagonizes Drivers Still Stuck in Traffic Gridlock

December 14, 2017 By Kerry Jackson 1 Comment

Quick, name the place where drivers suffer through maybe the worst traffic on Earth while policymakers are committed to making it altogether intolerable. Yes, of course it’s California.

Earlier this year, Inrix, a transportation analytics firm, ranked Los Angeles as the city with the worst traffic in the world, as measured by annual “peak hours spent in congestion.”

Southern California drivers who commute regularly to Los Angeles experience this gridlock every day. They spend an average of 104 hours “in congestion in 2016 during peak time periods.” Inrix says that sitting in traffic costs the average driver in the Southland $2,408 a year in lost productivity, and fuel burned while idling or creeping along in slow-moving parking lots.

Los Angeles also had “10 of the 25 worst traffic hotspots in America,” according to Inrix, “costing So Cal drivers an estimated $91 billion over the next 10 years.”

While California drivers slog through grueling traffic, policymakers have been putting them on a “road diet.” Joel Kotkin of Chapman University says “the notion animating the ‘road diet’ is to make congestion so terrible that people will be forced out of their cars and onto transit.”

The governor’s office has pursued road diets, as well as the cities of Los Angeles and San Jose. San Francisco has been putting its drivers on various, and often costly, road diets since the 1970s. The Reason Foundation says that in addition to its Vision Zero effort “to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2025,” Los Angeles “is still planning to implement over 40 road diet projects” across the city.

Further antagonizing California drivers is the $52 billion fuel tax hike that lawmakers passed to repair the state’s cracked and battered infrastructure. Is there a dime available for expanding highway capacity to open gridlock? Apparently not. But don’t be surprised if considerable portions of the revenue are spent on “transportation” projects that will not improve automobile travel. Transportation analyst Wendell Cox says that California lawmakers “don’t have any problems spending money on roads” as long as the funds aren’t used “to make drivers’ experiences any better.”

It’s not out of the realm to imagine that lawmakers will also try to siphon off some of the revenue to repair the high-speed train wreckage.

In addition to increasing the typical California family’s financial burden by nearly $800 a year, according to Reform California, the fuel tax hike is also organizationally incoherent, as are other elements of the state’s transportation policies. Consider:

How much of that $52 billion will be raised over 10 years if policymakers are able to eliminate vehicles with internal-combustion engines that burn the fossil fuels subject to the tax hike and replace them with electric vehicles? As the forced transition to EVsthat Brown and Democrat Assemblyman Phil Ting favor overlaps with the final years of higher fuel taxes, revenue will fall.
If the objective of road diets is to get drivers off the roads, won’t that also hurt revenue?
And if it’s a policy goal to remove cars from California roads, won’t the mandatory transition to EVs actually require a less than one-for-one replacement ratio? In other words, replacing every internal-combustion vehicle with an electric vehicle won’t decrease the number of cars. Will policies change from efforts to subsidize EV sales to discouraging them?

Public policy should be consistent, coherent and just. Not muddled, contradictory and heavy-handed. It should never be used to herd people, to compel them to conform to politically favored behaviors. But this is what we get from the government we have in California. It’s as lousy as the traffic congestion.

Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.

This article was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Driving, Los Angeles, Southern California, Traffic

$17 billion Delta water tunnels project faces critical MWD vote

October 10, 2017 By Steve Scauzillo Leave a Comment

After 11 years of planning, a massive tunnels project touted as a solution to the state’s vulnerable water supply faces its biggest test Tuesday.

The 38-member board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — the largest supplier of treated water in the United States delivering water to agencies serving 19 million people — is scheduled to vote on the $17 billion California WaterFix.

Metropolitan’s staff has waged a campaign in favor of the project for years and is recommending its board ratify the environmental review and also pay 26 percent of the cost, amounting to $4.3 billion. MWD’s wholesale water rates charged to 26 Southern California retail water districts and cities would rise 4.5 percent annually during the 18-year construction period, but the agency says WaterFix only accounts for 1 percent of the increase, with inflation accounting for the rest.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Department of Water Resources say the project will make water supplies more reliable, stabilize water flow and protect endangered fish species. The project would include installing three intakes north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and building two, 35-mile concrete diversion tunnels that would move water more efficiently into the State Water Project for cities and the federal Central Valley Project used by farmers. …

Read the full article from the Press-Enterprise

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: California WaterFix, Delta, Drought, MWD, Southern California, State Water Project, WaterFix

High-speed rail service to Vegas? Merely a Desert Mirage

August 24, 2017 By Kevin Dayton 6 Comments

Photo courtesy disneybrent, flickr

In 2014, Governor Jerry Brown infamously promoted California High-Speed Rail as the best way to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles. To justify the estimated $68 billion price tag, the governor tried to play the funny guy, asserting that “old people who shouldn’t be driving … should be sitting in a nice train car working on their iPad, having a martini.”

Now imagine high-speed rail between Southern California and Las Vegas. Instead of enduring the drive on I-15 across the Mojave Desert, people could sit in a nice train car getting a head start on a weekend of inebriation, having five martinis. As a bonus, taking the train instead of driving would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of global climate change.

How compelling is the idea of high-speed transportation between Southern California and Las Vegas? In a July 10, 2017 opinion piece published in various California newspapers, political commentator Joe Mathews declared that building major transportation infrastructure to improve travel connections between the two regions “might be the most powerful current idea in California.”

Actually, the idea is neither current nor powerful. Politicians have touted it for decades, particularly since Amtrak terminated direct service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in 1997 because of insufficient ridership. And so far the idea has failed to attract enough funding (public or private) to achieve it.

Mass transit between Southern California and Las Vegas is a vision similar to the planned high-speed rail system to connect Northern California and Southern California. Politicians and corporate executives make visionary statements – driven by professional public relations – that get overblown news coverage lacking in critical evaluation. Studies are done to prove the viability and feasibility of the project. Money is poured into planning and review. Then nothing substantial happens to overcome obvious hurdles to the vision.

California High-Speed Rail is a model for how visionary boondoggles get started. A coalition of corporations and unions teams up with politicians. They support a campaign asking voters to authorize government to borrow money and raise taxes to pay off that debt (including the interest). Voters then see well-tested rhetoric in the title of the ballot measure. Each voter takes five seconds to vote YES for imposing another tremendous debt burden on future generations.

It’s likely that one massive Joint Power Agency will eventually consolidate the ambitions of other Joint Power Agencies and ask voters to approve a massive bond measure to fund a passenger rail project between Southern California and Las Vegas. Before this campaign gets moving, the public needs to know the recent history of this idea.

Standard Passenger Rail Service

The most reasonable and achievable recent proposal for passenger rail service between Southern California to Las Vegas began moving forward in 2009 under the direction of Las Vegas Railway Express. The company has promised an adult-only experience called “the X Train,” or colloquially known as “the Party Train.” Originally the company planned to begin service in mid-2011. Eight years later the company is still promising to start soon.

In 2012, Las Vegas Railway Express Inc. reached an agreement with Union Pacific to use its existing track. The company now claims to be currently working with government agencies to “secure the necessary rights, equipment and facilities required to commence charter services in late 2017.”

As the company notes on its website, “there has been no regular passenger rail service between the Los Angeles and Las Vegas areas for over 18 years.” Amtrak operated direct passenger rail service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas until 1997, when it shut down the “Desert Wind” line because of declining ridership and cuts in government subsidies. Reportedly the service was unpopular in part because the trip sometimes lasted as long as eight hours. The train often had to yield to freight trains operated by the owner of the track, Union Pacific.

In weighing decisions about cost, convenience, and time, travelers had chosen instead to drive or fly via Southwest Airlines. Congress provided direct funding in 1999 to resume service, but it never started back up. Amtrak has no public plans to resume service to what is now described as a “shuttered, worn-down depot.”

Very High-Speed Passenger Rail Service (Maglev)

The empty desert would seem to be a relatively easy place to build a high-speed or very-high-speed rail alignment. In fact, there have been two proposals over several years to do this.

In the early 2000s, the Southern California Association of Governments and its individual member governments began considering public-private partnerships to plan, build, and operate a Maglev (magnetic levitation) train between Anaheim and Las Vegas. Congress even dedicated $45 million in 2006 for project planning, but three years later the Federal Railroad Administration had not released the funding. The private partner in the plan, a company called American Magline Group, had failed to raise enough money to qualify for the grant.

Today American Magline Group estimates a cost of $12-15 billion to build the complete project. It had estimated a cost of $12 billion in 2008. People suspect – with good reason – that the cost estimate for maglev is too low.

Remember that in 2008 supporters of Proposition 1A claimed in official voter information that a complete statewide high-speed rail system in California would cost $45 billion. Today, the Authority claims a line between San Francisco and Los Angeles – sharing track at times with commuter rail – will cost $64 billion.

High-Speed Passenger Rail Service

In 2009, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada shifted his allegiance from the maglev proposal to a more traditional high-speed rail proposal called DesertXpress, a privately-owned operation that would run from Las Vegas to Victorville. Advantages of this proposal included a lower cost (then estimated at $6.9 billion) and a more familiar and tested technology. Supposedly DesertXpress would eventually extend to Palmdale to connect with a planned California High-Speed Rail station.

In the end, DesertXpress could not qualify for a loan of $4.9 billion or $5.5 billion from the federal government to build the project, ostensibly because it would not or could not abide by a federal requirement to purchase train sets built in the United States and could not obtain an exemption. In 2015, a consortium affiliated with the People’s Republic of China became a partner and potential funding source for DesertXpress (renamed XpressWest in 2012), but the partnership ended a year later.

Why the Failure to Move Forward?

Backers of all three of these proposals claim that people will ride their system and operators will thus make money on them. The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada Las Vegas to Los Angeles Rail Corridor Improvement Feasibility Study sees the maglev proposal as feasible and desirable. The High Desert Corridor Joint Powers Authority High Desert Corridor: Investment Grade Ridership & Revenue Forecasts projects similar success. And the X Train is sure to be a winner, if you believe the public relations over the last eight years.

Why are investors leery of pouring their money into these long-term projects? As shown when the California High-Speed Rail Authority has sought private funding (as required by voter-approved Proposition 1A), potential investors want assurances from the government to reduce their risk before getting involved.

Just like California High-Speed Rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the profitability of a passenger train between Southern California and Las Vegas will depend on travelers evaluating transportation options and choosing the train from among them. Ridership projections – even if they are “scientific” – have limited value because of unknown objective criteria (for example, the future cost of driving or flying) and unmeasurable subjective criteria (for example, the willingness of people to travel captive with an inebriated crowd for five hours).

The end of Amtrak passenger service in 1997 and subsequent failures to initiate three modes of intercity mass transit are warnings that trying to connect Southern California and Las Vegas may end up as another government-driven scheme to enrich special interests at the expense of everyone else. Voters need to be wary when the politicians, corporations, and unions ask them for money to make this powerful vision come true.

This article was originally published by the CA Policy Center

Kevin Dayton, a frequent contributor to CPC’s Prosperity Digest, is the President & CEO of Labor Issues Solutions, LLC, and is the author of frequent postings about generally unreported California state and local policy issues at www.laborissuessolutions.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DaytonPubPolicy.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: high speed rail, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Southern California

Film Crew Accused of Baiting Sharks in Southern California

June 15, 2017 By Joel B. Pollak 5 Comments

Maritime authorities intervened to stop a National Geographic crew from baiting sharks off the coast of Long Beach in the midst of a local panic about great white sharks appearing near the shore, according to a local news report.

The Orange County Register reported Wednesday that “officials suspect that some media outlets aren’t satisfied with footage of naturally occurring shark sightings.” It elaborated:

Long Beach lifeguard officials say they strongly suspect film crews are throwing fish or bait in the water near shore to attract sharks, also known as “chumming.”

“We’ve gotten some reports from citizens who have seen recreational boats out chumming,” Gonzalo Medina, Marine Safety chief, said. “Some fishing boats too. They’re trying to get video footage of the sharks.

Some film crews are reportedly chumming within 100 yards of the shore. One official told the Register that authorities had stopped a National Geographic film crew: “We had a crew from National Geographic. … We talked with them, and they were very receptive. Ultimately, they used rubber fish attached to a line that they could pull back in.” The crew was not issued a citation, the Register reports.

In late April, a woman was attacked and severely injured by a great white shark while swimming at San Onofre State Beach in Orange County.

Since then, great white sharks have been spotted near the shore in Orange County and in Long Beach. Though it is not rare to see juvenile great whites in Southern California waters, it is unusual to see mature sharks, especially near the shore.

The news reports have frightened many swimmers and surfers as the summer season begins.

Now, it seems, media companies may be chumming the waters to create the very news they hope to report.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

This piece was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: National Geographic, Shark, Southern California